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After years of talking about innovation there is insufficient progress in deploying innovation in organizations around the world. There are tools and methods to gain new skills, but a framework for deploying innovation in an organization is still missed. Because there is no single model of innovation that works for all firms, companies get into trouble by trying to imitate a company that is very much unlike them. Companies need processes and tools that inspire collaboration on a massive scale. Perhaps most important, organizations must help employees develop traits to excel in this type of environment.

But is your workforce and talent strategy aligned to allow collaboration on this scale? Are you fostering creativity in the team? Also consider the innovations in operating models that you as a business leader can bring about to accelerate growth. Advances in mobile technology and cloud computing now allow organizations to leverage them in strategic ways to stand out from their competitors, while saving cost. IBM has several assessments that can get you started on growth and innovation initiatives, with the choice of entry points depending on your priorities.

Take advantage of key industry innovation from IBM Research to differentiate your organization in the marketplace. This accelerator provides an assessment of your organization’s capacity to introduce focused innovation within Telecommunications industry and into your environment and enables your adoption of industry innovation in a reliable, cost contained and risk-controlled manner to enable differentiation while avoiding learn-as-you- go implementation situations.

Take advantage of key industry innovation from IBM Research to differentiate your organization in the marketplace through improved front office business capabilities. This accelerator provides an assessment of your organization’s capacity to introduce focused innovation within Consumer Products industry and into your environment and enables your adoption of industry innovation in a reliable, cost contained and risk-controlled manner to enable differentiation while avoiding learn-as-you-go implementation situations.

Develop an understanding of the current structure and organization readiness to deploy innovation. This accelerator identifies and develops self-reinforcing capabilities that support the existing strengths of your business.

Gain new insight for business planning enabling better alignment of workforce investments and business strategies. Analyze your workforce strategy and assess performance against industry best practices to identify areas for improvement. This assessment provides a roadmap to implement the new workforce and talent management recommendations.

Prioritize your business model innovation opportunities around changing the value chain, creating new revenue streams, changing your product mix, or altering the way a business operates across its extended enterprise. This assessment Identifies, analyzes and prioritizes cloud-enabled business model opportunities within the context of your industry.

This accelerator provides you with a framework to achieve operational innovation by linking the organization’s business strategy to all of its operating elements in a manner which is rationalized, aligned and unified. This accelerator is an approach for you to identify inefficiencies and design an operations model in which all the elements mutually reinforce each other and support the overall strategy.

Integrate the unique capabilities offered by mobile devices into your business. This assessment is designed to develop an enterprise level mobile business vision and supporting rationale as well as a portfolio of mobile capabilities and applications. The strategy is balanced by tactical recommendations addressing device/platform type as well as infrastructure and integration requirements.

A transformation is taking place in how people interact and how relationships form and develop and this is changing the way we socialize, the way we work and the way we engage with our customers, partners, and employees. This shift in technology and human behavior presents an opportunity for organizations to improve everything from reinventing customer relationships to how work gets done. A social business embraces networks of people to create business value, and activates networks of people that apply relevant content and expertise to improve and accelerate core and ad hoc processes, delivering unprecedented return for the time invested.

Businesses need to make the most of a global workforce. To do this, organizations need to develop an HR capability that delivers cost-effective services to a global population, provide an infrastructure that enables individuals to collaborate regardless of location, and develop creative leaders that can deliver results in spite of uncertainty. These assessments analyze your workforce strategy and supply chain to assess performance against industry best practices to identify areas for improvement.

Reduces cycle time and costs for external business partners by automating transactions. This engagement defines a roadmap to implement visibility. Using a proven approach, analytical tools and deep supply chain management expertise we can help you create a prioritized visibility implementation plan based on benefits realization and other implementation considerations.

Gain insight and receive prioritized recommendations and a roadmap of where to start to improve workforce and talent management. This assessment delivers an actionable roadmap that provides recommendations for creative leadership development, workforce global readiness and enterprise-wide collaboration.

Capitalize on collective intelligence (internal and external) for faster innovation. This short term strategy consulting engagement helps your organization understand your current adoption of social media for both internal and external purpose. This accelerator builds a roadmap for people, organizational, and technological change.

Finance efficiency makes businesses scalable, agile and fast. Strong business insight capabilities help them drive operational efficiency, spot market opportunities, react faster and ultimately predict changes in the business environment. To enable these capabilities, you need to have far greater levels of information integration across the enterprise, analytical talent that can effectively partner with the business, and more mature analytical capabilities, such as integrated planning and forecasting, scenario planning and predictive modeling. Individually, each of these capabilities offers performance advantages – but together they offer far more. By doing both – executing core finance activities efficiently and providing the critical insights businesses so desperately need –companies can make much better decisions.

The Finance Healthcheck assessment can help chart out a roadmap for those organizations that want to use greater insight and finance efficiency to outperform their peers in the areas of revenue growth, income and stock price appreciation. And the BAO Jumpstart for Risk, Finance and Fraud assessment can provide an analysis of your highest risk areas.

Make business decisions with a high degree of confidence and gain a competitive edge with enterprise visibility. This engagement provides you with a range of opportunities to deliver insight and business outcomes, including diagnostic assessments of your organization’s performance and fraud management capabilities along with tactical offerings focused on helping you gain greater business value from your current enterprise analytics investments.

Improve efficiency in financial operations that can help the enterprise outperform its peers by determining where expectation versus execution gaps exist and how you can move forward to close them. The Healthcheck provides a diagnostic assessment and a realistic plan for improving the finance organization’s performance.

In an age of technologically savvy and smarter consumers, who are increasingly connected with each other through a number of mobile devices, tablets and applications, competing on product and price alone are unsustainable strategies for success. Social networking and mobile commerce have dramatically changed the dynamic between buyer and seller and customer expectations of service, price and delivery are soaring. Organizations need to understand and accommodate customer behavior and needs - even anticipating them - and engage customers as individuals at the right time, while providing a consistent brand experience across channels.

Today’s analytics provide opportunities to explore big data, detect patterns and reveal new insights – knowing how to effectively access, analyze and use data is crucial to understanding and engaging individual customers. Equally important is the need to provide a seamless, cross-channel customer experience to build trust, loyalty and advocacy. Where do you begin then? Whether you have already made the investments or are in the process of doing so, IBM’s assessments can help ensure you maximize the return on your marketing investments.

Identify customers by value and invest in them appropriately by delivering the right message, at the right time, with the right offer. The assessment helps you understand the specific opportunities that can benefit from customer analytics by analyzing current capabilities, assessing desired capability gaps, and recommending a roadmap for building a state of the art marketing function.

Identify your customer needs and expectations in the context of a more mobile, socially connected and digitally transformed world. Based on the identified needs, our consultants collaborate with you to align cross channel capabilities across your entire commerce value chain to maximize value. The assessment provides a strategic analysis and prioritized recommendations for how you can strengthen your customer relationships and increase customer value, differentiation, and top-line growth.

Helps you adopt Unica and Coremetrics technologies and integrate these tools with your core commerce capabilities. The assessment can help if you are considering Unica and Coremetrics software and want to ensure the highest level of ROI through more robust planning, integration and solution alignment with business strategy. If you have already implemented Unica and/or Coremetrics, the assessment can help you take advantage of the full set of product capabilities.

Identify new, breakthrough, business and smarter commerce models and positioning, created by the new and evolving needs of the social, digital, and mobile consumer. The assessment will develop new strategies for growth around a handful of new, high potential, value-propositions to help you capitalize on emerging possibilities.

Capitalize on pervasive change to define a new path to value for marketing using the Smarter marketing accelerator. This accelerator is designed to help you envision the future of customer interactions and the marketing capabilities required to capture value. Through this engagement we analyze your current state against a future vision, identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement in marketing performance, and design the path to value based on prioritization of business capabilities and return on investment.

Analyses how social media accelerates and challenges your current business strategy and builds a roadmap for people, organizational, and technological change. This assessment analyzes your adoption of social media for both internal and external purposes, and can help you capitalize on collective intelligence (internal & external) for faster innovation and increase customer insight and responsiveness.

Social networking, increased mobility, adoption of digital channels, increased consumer expectations and transparency across industries are just a few of the factors fundamentally reshaping customer interaction. Enterprises are responding by adding new interaction models and enhancing channel capabilities. However, the challenge for businesses today is figuring out where to invest by determining which capabilities will be most impactful to customers.

Realizing the full potential of mobile and the connected consumer requires creating a successful mobile strategy. Complicating this is the variety of devices and platforms, employees who increasingly wish to use their own devices at work, application level and device management, cost controls, and security concerns. And unfortunately, many companies are inefficiently expending significant capital, time, resources – and worse – opportunities trying to develop a strategy that does not add much value to their brands, businesses, or bottom lines. These assessments will help you develop an enterprise level mobile and social business vision and supporting rationale as well as the strategy for optimizing your customers’ channel experience.

Increase your customer insight and responsiveness. This strategy consulting engagement articulates how social media accelerates and challenges current business strategy and builds a roadmap for people, organizational, and technological change.

Develop an enterprise level mobile business vision and supporting rationale as well as a portfolio of mobile capabilities/applications. This accelerator results is an actionable roadmap that optimizes mobile opportunities and accelerates time to market.

Achieving the right balance of control and autonomy to drive efficiency while providing policy enforcement

In a world in which the proliferation of data continues to accelerate, information security has increased as a key enterprise priority. And with continually changing regulations that govern data security and privacy, you can’t afford to be unsure whether your existing policies and procedures help support regulatory compliance for information protection. Many organizations may find it challenging to put the appropriate level of focus and resource on data protection. Hence, it is critical that the right amount of investment is made to adequately safeguard information within your application portfolio.

Leading organizations are becoming sophisticated in their ability to leverage analytics to better manage performance, avoid risk and address fraud. Our assessments help organizations begin on a path to value by assisting them with determining the biggest and highest value opportunities that can be addressed with analytics, understanding their organizational and technology readiness to embed and support analytics, and identifying recommendations and next steps for how best to move forward.

Make business decisions with a high degree of confidence and gain a competitive edge with enterprise visibility. This engagement provides you with a range of opportunities to deliver insight and business outcomes, including diagnostic assessments of your organization’s performance and fraud management capabilities along with tactical offerings focused on helping you gain greater business value from your current enterprise analytics investments.

Evaluate threats, risk and compliance in the context of an increasingly complex world driven by new levels of cyber incidents and more onerous regulatory requirements. This assessment consists of a robust yet rapid assessment and set of actionable recommendations that can help you more effectively manage resource allocation and risk.

Businesses face many challenges today, including IT inefficiencies, rising operating costs, changes in technology, and an aging infrastructure. These challenges can affect their ability to control rising costs while maintaining an IT environment that is able to support the current technology and business requirements. Organizations should align the current IT strategy, resources and investment to changes in business direction and corporate strategy.

As companies and organizations grow and merge, the accompanying growth of their IT often results in a mishmash of technologies and platforms that is difficult and costly to manage. This complexity makes it difficult for IT to support business requirements and adapt to changes in strategy and business direction. In a turbulent economic environment, many organizations find they don’t have the flexibility within their enterprise architecture to quickly react to changes in the marketplace. Additionally, new projects take longer and are more expensive to implement with a complex enterprise architecture that is not aligned with business priorities. With our assessments, you can improve the effectiveness of your IT program and transform your enterprise architecture into a source of strategic advantage.

Increase IT flexibility to adapt to changing business needs. This assessment helps you achieve growth and innovation through a strategic road map that provides short- and long-term recommendations for aligning IT strategy with business goals.

While globalization has yielded improvements in market reach and operational efficiencies, it has also increased organizations’ exposure to critical supply chain risk. Effective visibility enables an organization to immediately anticipate, communicate and address critical exposure to supply chain risk spanning supplier management, operational excellence and customer management activities. An optimized supply chain enables a firm to achieve greater functional and cross-entity collaboration and the ability to drive business optimization through the use of analytics. Supply chain optimization opens up opportunities for substantial cost reductions. Organizations whose supply chain related costs comprise the majority of their cost structure can benefit from IBM’s deep expertise, advanced analytic tools and methods.

Supply chain optimization is also central to those organizations where partnering is a core innovation strategy. To enable sustained, fruitful innovation partnerships, organizations need deeper, more integrated relationships and their ERP systems need to be optimized to ensure the collaboration is seamless, but also secure. IBM is a world leader in supply chain consulting and has several years of experience, having worked with clients from across the industries. These assessments are the best way to get started on building your supply chain for the future.

Reduces cycle time and costs for external business partners by automating transactions. This engagement defines a roadmap to implement visibility. Using a proven approach, analytical tools and deep supply chain management expertise we can help you create a prioritized visibility implementation plan based on benefits realization and other implementation considerations.

Improve demand and supply forecast accuracy. This engagement accelerates your path to benefits realization by creating a plan to simultaneously increase product availability and service levels while reducing the inventory. Integrated sales, marketing, and collaborative partner forecasting techniques and tools can be applied for improvements in forecast accuracy.

Understand opportunities to enhance your existing SAP solution to support your supply chain objectives. This service uses IBM’s best practices and leverages assets from our global SAP practice to perform analysis and provide comprehensive recommendations for optimizing the use of SAP to support your business strategy and reduce the total cost of ownership of the SAP platform.

Understand opportunities to enhance your existing Oracle solution to support your supply chain objectives. The Healthcheck helps you with an Oracle footprint to assess the impact of your current enterprise architecture and identify opportunities to improve cost efficiency and performance and operations improvements.

Many companies today face significant challenges in taking out cost and unlocking business value from their application portfolios. Large, complex application portfolios require significant investments of time and money just to maintain. Disconnected and inflexible systems, fragile coupling, duplication of function and data increase the costs of routine and business-mandated changes. And then, there is cloud and application virtualization added to the mix. A focused application portfolio management strategy is essential to ensure a company’s business agility and ability to innovate.

When it comes to Enterprise Resource Planning applications such as SAP and Oracle, many organizations find that over a period time the ROI from these applications has dwindled. Often this could be because of mergers and acquisitions and other developments that have changed the business priorities, but not the business processes. IBM has deep expertise in advising organizations on optimizing applications and IT-business alignment. Leverage these highly effective assessments to realize value from your application investments.

Define the best ways to drive rapid cost savings by collecting relevant application portfolio information, analyzing the information in the context of business and technical objectives, and identifying transformation opportunities. The assessment enables you to quickly identify areas for process improvement and to develop a roadmap that includes priorities and strategies to better align the overall enterprise portfolio with the requirements of the business processes and models.

This assessment provides a rapid, yet comprehensive assessment of the existing SAP enterprise portfolio and related IT infrastructure to determine alignment with your business goals and strategic direction. This service uses IBM’s best practices and leverages assets from our global SAP practice to perform analysis and provide comprehensive recommendations for optimizing the use of SAP to support your business strategy and reduce the total cost of ownership of the SAP platform.

Achieve stronger alignment between enterprise architecture and business priorities, including improved process and data integration, identification of the impact of leveraging industry-leading functionality and improved support of enterprise performance metrics. This assessment identifies areas to reduce working capital requirements such as cash and inventory, and improve customer service by reducing cycle time and increasing service levels.

Shorten release cycles, reduce risks, and eliminate critical development and testing constraints. This assessment demonstrates the benefits of application virtualization by virtualizing a set of your application services and assessing the ability to optimize computing resources and simplify existing development and test management infrastructure.

Business leaders today understand the future is one of heightened intelligence and awareness; one driven by harnessing the growing velocity, variety, and volume of data. The challenge is converting it into actionable insights that drive faster and better decision-making, resulting in faster outcomes, greater profits, superior flexibility, and optimal operational efficiency.

Customer, marketing, and sales analytics can provide organizations with the ability to better understand their customers by value and invest in them appropriately by delivering the right message, at the right time, with the right offer. Building customer insights through advanced analytics is how IBM is bringing science to the art of marketing. Analytics is also helping organizations make more informed strategic choices and improve finance efficiency. Our rapid but high impact assessments enable organizations to harness the vast stores of customer, market, financial and enterprise data and turn it into advanced insights for market advantage.

Develop actionable customer insights and improve your ability to capture, retain and service customers. This assessment delivers a comprehensive vision and roadmap for a data driven marketing and sales organization as well as short term, problem focused data analysis to prove fast value and help you evaluate possibilities.

Address your biggest challenges and opportunities by integrating, aligning, and analyzing information. The assessment provides a framework and roadmap for building a strategic foundation for analytics, so that you can turn information into actionable insight.

Address challenges of compressed decision cycles with real-time analytics. This engagement provides you with opportunities to deliver insight and business outcomes including assessments of an organization’s performance and fraud management capabilities and offerings focused on helping you gain greater business value from your current enterprise analytics investments.

Understand the biggest and highest value business opportunities to pursue with analytics. This assessment accelerates your analytics initiatives and helps you understand how to best get started by identifying areas of opportunity, evaluating current capabilities and providing a roadmap and next steps for achieving their objectives.